The Transforming Imagination Quadrant uses pictures from the artist Magritte to show four possible worlds of imagination/learning and leadership/creativity. It is important to understand that Magritte’s style and work is used here to unravel the processes of perception and thinking involved in creating something new.

Each world, The Bureaucrat, The Expert, The Delinquent and the Expert- Beginner describe a set of norms values, and rules that organise experience. Each world is a set of mental patterns which can be described through their relationship with ideas, stories, language/labels and emotion.

Collecting and analysing data will not create new ideas. It is a logical dead –end, an impossibility, because the rules that structure data already pre-determine your output. Not realizing this logic of experience means you are trapped in a cyclic process of learning not to learn. To create or design something new you have to learn to create new models of categorisation, new rules to play the game with.

Let’s make no mistake here; becoming an Expert Beginner requires courage and motivation of the highest level. Unfrozenmind requires that leaders turn the governing principles of Blind Vision and Blind Emotion on their head. Deploying and releasing imagination means that you have to enable organisations and individuals to overcome their emotional obstacles.

It is really important that promoting emotion within this context is understood as a process of self-discipline and not as a form of Emotional Intelligence which promotes the status quo. The processes of perception and emotion are fundamentally entwined.

Cutting through appearances, designing vision, learning how to negate and transform labels, requires the simultaneous development of positive emotional factors.

The Expert Beginner is a deliberate oxymoron which establishes new governing principles for learning. “In the mind of the expert, there are no possibilities… in the mind of the beginner, all possibilities exist”.

When you focus on game-breaking strategies on order to create great ideas, then error creation replaces error avoidance. The Expert Beginner is able to create new patterns of thinking, talking and acting that will impact individual and organisational future. Harnessing and releasing the collective imagination of the organisation will be the new role of leaders.

The golden thread running through the landmark theories of leadership, strategy, performance, innovation and organisational design for the last 20 to 30 years is the relationship between change and the mind.

The success of radical innovation depends on “the constraints of established patterns of thought and action.” And this is where the problem lies. Our common sense view of how the mind works, especially in relation to disciplines like innovation, strategy, creativity and the like is at odds with the way experience is actually constructed.

The missing link in current models of personal and organisational development is the relationship between theory and practice. It can be argued that most of these frameworks are based on principles which implicitly operate from a taboo of subjectivity, and therefore do not adequately take into account the role of perception and emotion in designing experience. Moreover, we can draw the conclusion that unless business academics and corporate executives take into account the processes of Blind Vision and Blind Emotion they in fact collude in skilfully maintaining convergence.

The Traditional model of business leadership needs to turns its microscope round the other way and look at how organisations design their own experience. Real competitive advantage exists in transforming thought and creating new ideas

Until this is realised, in effect all external restructuring is really the equivalent of reshuffling the deckchairs on the Titanic. We need a new model of business strategy which breaks the taboo of subjectivity and sets out an organisational framework to enable new modes of thinking, talking and acting.

In an economy based on ideas and meaning, imagination is your competitive edge. If you seriously want to pursue groundbreaking advances in Innovation and Leadership then establishing a breakthrough scenario to take the conceptual and emotional high ground is not a nice to have, but a must.

Having won 1^st prize at the TEC awards ceremony in Paris for their design and development of 3D Immersive environments with Shell, Unfrozenmind won an additional 2^nd prize for their work in Virtual Leadership Development.

TEC Paris organises an annual awards ceremony that recognises innovative corporate projects using 3D environments and for serious gaming. Other winners this year include L’Oreal, Michelin, BNP Paribas and Shell. The award for their work in Virtual Leadership Development awarded to Unfrozenmind by Philip Rosedale (real) and handed to the team via his avatar (virtual).

Virtual Leadership Development using Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) is a new area that is rapidly gaining the mindshare of corporate Human Resource heads looking to cutting edge techniques and technologies to develop their executive talent. “Its about learning the skills of Web 2.0 in highly competitive virtual scenarios , where collaboration and leadership can be intensively trained, and best of all it is a lot of fun” says Unfrozenmind Marketing Director Alexei Levene.

By enabling Virtual Leadership Development programmes that are globally scalable, and encourage diversity, Human Resource Executives can bring innovative development techniques to their executives that are less costly and faster to implement and scale than more traditional Leadership Development courses.

About Unfrozenmind

Unfrozenmind is a Strategic Innovation Think Tank focused on changing the governing principles of the global economy through fostering the concept of Noble Business… business as a force for good. As the driving force of the global economy moves from products and services to human talent, Unfrozenmind shows how the business of innovation is the business of personal and organizational transformation.

Focusing on Strategic Innovation, Collaboration, Horizontal Communication and Virtual Leadership Development, Unfrozenmind helps organizations to Design Legends.

Unfrozenmind is powered by Community Chest, our strategic technology partner. Community Chest is the first marketing and communication agency established both in Paris and Second Life and has clients such as Michelin, ArcelorMittal, Jean Paul Gaultier, Lacoste, and Première Urgences.

For further information on Unfrozenmind please contact

Alexei Levene, Marketing Director alexei_levene@unfrozenmind.com

Or visit us at www.unfrozenmind.com

Or our 3D Academy at http://slurl.com/secondlife/UnfroZenMind/169/72/36

About the TEC awards

The landscape of organisational and leadership development is being radically transformed by three major trends: The first, “Globalisation”, has opened the doors to new markets, new revenues and new growth opportunities. But it has brought in its wake a level of complexity both on a micro scale (dealing with the tactical and operational processes and decisions that make the business more efficient and effective) and on a macro scale dealing with the socio-political context of your business- that places Talent development and Organisational Design in the forefront of developing competitive advantage.

Whilst globalisation is a word that may seem to have lost some of its currency in business executives circles, without a doubt your competitive advantage will be eroded or dented severely because of this major force. Having a “quality” driven organisation focused on getting things right is your entrance ticket into today’s marketplace, not the end result. The conclusion in business terms is that “The World is Flat” (i): the “bottom-line” has dropped out of externally-based business strategies. The concept of “economic value” has mutated in the marketplace from a quantitative measurement of success, to a qualitative hierarchy of ideas. This transition from economic value to economic creativity marks a paradigm shift from the “Box-Economy”, measured by the optimisation of moving boxes, thinking in boxes, putting people in boxes and exchanging boxes, to the “Ideas-Economy”. “Quality” has morphed from a technical and mechanical emphasis to a subjective one. It is the qualities of your people in driving creativity, innovation, communication, and collaboration that will transform your competitive advantage. (ii)

Technical and or numerical advantages will only have a limited life span in this context. Corporations seeking to out-manoeuvre each other by squeezing the last juice out of their supply chains have unknowingly become ensnared by the inherent fault-line of the digital information race.

As the information playing field becomes levelled out by the speed-trap of technology, “Business @ the speed of thought” paradoxically results in a technological “groundhog day”. Speed has now become commoditised, reducing “efficiency” and “effectiveness” to “table-stakes”(iii). Thinking in straight lines, digitally or otherwise, will keep you going round in circles.

The second trend is the move towards “Distributed Teams”, which refers to the way business teams are spread across the globe communicating and meeting virtually when the situation demands it. Hierarchical line management has been replaced by flexible project management structures whose characteristics are based on the fitness and relevance of skills. Power and positional leadership models are now replaced by situational leadership styles in which people step up or are chosen by the team on the basis of skills- such as planning, collaboration, communication and problem solving. Leadership skills are faced off against the “task” and as such may require different leaders for different projects and even multiple leaders within the same project.

These abilities and skills stand in stark contrast to the vertical machinery that holds most organisations together. As the driving force of business moves from marshalling numbers to innovation, central tenet of its pedagogy moves from the logic of control and management, to the logic of collaboration and situational leadership. The model of business has been transformed from a mechanical structure focused on optimising delivery, to a horizontal structure focused on collaborative breakthroughs and situational leadership.

The third trend is the virtualization of the worlds of B2B and B2C. The key forces driving Web 2.0 are about user-created content and experiences across collaborative networks. Social networking, 3D immersive environments and online role-playing games (MMORPG) are providing the examples and tools to enable business organisations transform their competitive advantage through collaboration. Leaders and organisations enmeshed in vertical managed cultures will find these changes both threatening and incomprehensible. Ask yourself the question, “How much experience have you of second-life, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, Age of Conan and Eve?” The in-built cultural models of senior management thinking which decide what is right and wrong are being fundamentally challenged by experiences being driven by technology which digitally connects people across communities and cultures, transforming meaning and identity. Revolutions have been started using these technologies, from Burma to Columbia. US and French Presidential elections have seen parties and candidates supporting and connecting with people in ways previously considered impossible. Organisations like Shell, Michelin or IBM recognise that 3D immersive environments will transform their capacity to deliver new value models, new ways of doing business that transcend the traditional analytical models now in use.

Understanding, experiencing and gaming in these virtual worlds is a training ground for the senior management teams of today and the future.

i. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, FSG, 2005

ii. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat, FSG, 2005; Tom Peters, Re Imagine, DK, 2003; Michael Newman, Creative Leaps, Wiley, 2003; Kevin Roberts, Love Marks, Powerhouse Books, 2004; W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy, HBS, 2006.

iii. Michael Newman, Creative Leaps, Wiley, 2003, see Kevin Roberts, CEO Saatchi & Saatchi, presentation on CD included with book.

“To its credit, the Catholic Church did formally acknowledge that it had badly mistreated Galileo Galilei, and that it had made a grave mistake when it forced him to recant, under threat of death, his belief that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. And it said so in a formal proclamation – in 1983.” (1)

An idea is by definition dangerous. It is dangerous because if it is worthy of its name it threatens the status quo. When new ideas are introduced into the board room or in fact any part of the organisation they are tried by the three principles of skilled unawareness: consensus, self-censure and compromise these are in turn held in place through fear, uncertainty and doubt, an emotional mechanism which hamstrings an organisation’s ability to function.

Skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion is the emotional matrix of afflictive emotions which holds Blind Vision in place. What we discover is that any information, conversation or action which threatens the status quo is ejected both privately in our own mental decision-making processes and socially in group/team processes. This is what Aries de Guess calls the organisation’s auto immune system.

The organisation rejects new information and skilfully seals it-self back up in its protective cocoon of convergence. It is also very important to understand that skilled unawareness/Blind Emotion runs across an organisation’s network of clients, advisors, and key stakeholders. This means that the generally accepted rules that define successful outcomes across Strategy, Communication and Performance are channelled into a set of internal tramlines that lead to commoditisation. The organisation’s collective awareness operates on blind, skilfully maintaining convergent thinking and emotions, whilst convinced that their strategic intention is otherwise.

Good management and good communication are bad for business. Designing Emotion, that is transforming this learned incapacity, the emotional and cognitive pre-established patterns that keep organisations and individuals in orbit around the status quo, is a pre requisite for creating great ideas.

1) Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work, Organisations Intelligence in action, Amacom, 2003 p125.

Francisco Varela in conversation with the Dalai Lama at a Mind Life Conference said “This idea – that people vary in their abilities as observers of their own experience – may seem completely obvious to you, Your Holiness, but you will be surprised how non-evident, almost revolutionary it is among researchers in the West. Everybody knows that you have to train to be a sportsman, or a musician, or a mathematician. But when it comes to observing one’s experience, it as if there is nothing to learn – it’s just there. You cannot underestimate the degree to which there is a culture of blindness about this”.

Unless we understand “the way we think” then it is the very process of this way of “thinking” which remains the obstacle to achieving our goals. The issue is that our attention is trapped by content (Blind Vision), and we have no awareness of the processes that shape and structure the content. In other words, the blind spot in business is not the “What” or the “How” but the Who?

To create change, business leaders need to come face to face with the question of WHO they are. This is the cultivation and development of Howard Gardner’s 9th intelligence, existential intelligence: “Existential thinking… entails the human capacity to pose and ponder the biggest questions: who are we? Why are we here? What is going to happen to us? Why do we die? What is it all about, in the end?” The root cause of the blind spot, not exploring this WHO, is that our cultural model of scientific objectivity outlaws personal exploration and transformation.

Organisations need to escape the cultural prohibitions of a learning method that traps individuals from investigating their own experience. We need to concentrate on developing skilled observation (Designing Vision) of the labels and objects within experience. Discovering who we are, our vision, and living our dream will become the new role of corporations of the future.

An old story tells of a young man who keeps hearing about a wonderful tailor, Zumbach, whose suits can make anyone look handsome and stylish. One day the man goes to Zumbach and asks him to make a suit. So Zumbach takes his measurements and tells him to come back in a week.

A week later the young customer eagerly goes back for his suit and has the man try it on. It looks wonderful – except that one sleeve is longer than the other, the buttons do not match up and the trousers are too short. So the customer complains. Zumbach, deeply affronted, says with great indignation, it’s not the suit. The trouble is the way you are wearing it. If you crook your left elbow just a bit, the sleeves will be perfect. And if you hunch forward and raise your right shoulder, the buttons, match up splendidly. Then if you’ll just bend your knees a bit, you’ll see the trousers are just right.” The customer tries it and, lo and behold, the suit fits like a glove – and it’s gorgeous.”

The tailor is the set of internal principles which shape and cut your experience. The tailor and the suit exist within our mind. Unless you realise that experience is organised into pre-established emotional patterns, then habit, conditioned by language, social conventions and shared concepts, will custom-tailor your experience. Patterns of thinking, talking and acting drive strategy, communication and performance. Personal transformation, creativity and innovation are about understanding and mastering the nature of this principle experientially. Understanding the logic of how lived experience is conditioned is a strategic imperative for those leaders and organisations who wish to break out of the pernicious nature of habitual thinking and compete in an idea driven economy. (Tailor Zumbach Story from Emotional Alchemy by Tara Bennet-Goleman)

Unfrozenmind is about putting the mind back into business.

As the driving force of the global economy moves from products and services to human talent, Unfrozenmind shows how the business of innovation is the business of personal transformation.

Unfrozenmind shifts the north star of the business world from the knowledge of business to the business of knowledge. The strategic positioning of Unfrozenmind commoditises the competition and creates a new-brand opportunity whose potential equity and bandwidth is greater than that of its competitors.

Unfrozenmind demonstrates clearly, using a variety of Visual Thinking tools, how a science of the mind, a science of first person experience, provides the most valuable foundation from which to grow human potential and organisational innovation.

Unfrozenmind turns the taboo of subjectivity inherent in the Western scientific/business model on its head and shows that business strategy and the future of the planet depends on the business world turning inward and mastering divergence.

The logical principles of Unfrozenmind show that competitive advantage is not to be found from doing “Business @ the speed of thought” but from exploring the space between your thoughts. By making a marriage of Eastern psychology and Western psychology Unfrozenmind knocks down the Cartesian wall and creates a new paradigm, the Lotus-Economy, which shows how creativity, innovation, leadership and organisational change emerge from transforming the processes of thinking, talking and acting.

Unfrozenmind has created a roadmap to help business leaders and organisations understand the why, what and the how of organisational innovation.